The ability to socially network with contacts has always been important in business and personal relationships. With the digital age has come new ways to discover information about people to help in maintaining relationships. In addition to traditional ways of maintaining relationships with people, such as telephone, email, text messaging, and instant messaging, new social networking technologies have been rapidly developing such as RSS feeds, blogging, and Voice over IP (VoIP). In addition, a plethora of websites have entered the cultural mainstream that allow users to have their own virtual personality, such as personal web pages, myspace.com, friendster.com, and the like. Other sources of social information exist that will be described in further detail below.
However, while these traditional and developing methods of identifying social information for a contact are beneficial, keeping up with social information requires a large amount of time and effort because a user must largely access separate applications. For a particular contact, suppose a contact in a regular week maintains social networking with a contact via the following ways: sending email, IM, by mobile phone, reviewing the contact's blog, looking at the contact's myspace.com page and also keeping up with an RSS feed that the contact publishes. In order to do this, the user generally has to access an email application, an IM application, a mobile phone, a blog website, a myspace.com website, and an RSS feed reader. Thus, keeping up with one's social contacts can be quite time consuming.